Wow. When I ran OS X Leopard on this 17" MacBook Pro w/4GB RAM, all the fancy pages posted on HN used to peg my cores at 100% and made the fans roar like jet engines. Now I'm running Slackware Linux (64 bit) on it, and this page is running as smooth as butter in Firefox 19.0.2. It's nice to be at the other end of the spectrum, for once. It runs almost as smoothly in Chrome, but with a little more jitter during the transitions and a bit more CPU usage. Not so nice in Opera, which is struggling to get all the pieces working and kind of ruins the experience.
I opened it on 2011 27'' iMac (16 GB RAM, 2.7 GHz Core i5, AMD Radeon HD 6770M 512 MB) in Firefox 19.0.2 and everything was smooth, and CPU was barely used at all. I'm not sure why your Macbook which should be a faster machine is sweating on that page?
Mine too -- same config. Love the resolution, but the 2D performance has been disappointing from the start. I upgrade my MBP every year, and hoping that we see some improvement this year in the graphics handling.
that's probably due to a few big graphics on the website. does anyone have suggestions how to handle that (except using less graphic intensive graphics) ??